NONFICTION - April 19, 1992

A FULL SERVICE BANK: How BCCI Stole Billions Around the World by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz (Pocket Books: $22; 381 pp.). “I have a choice of either seeming stupid or venal.” That’s what influential Washington attorney Clark Clifford said last year, famously, in attempting to explain his chairmanship of a bank illegally controlled by the notorious, now moribund Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Clifford’s self-deprecating analysis of his affiliation with the bank made headlines at the time, but it takes on added significance in the light of “A Full Service Bank,” for financial reporter James Ring Adams and Los Angeles Times national correspondent Douglas Frantz demonstrate that Clifford--who hoped to paint himself as just another victim of BCCI--wasn’t so different from his discredited clients: highly respectable, smooth-talking and willing to turn a blind eye to questionable activities. Although the bankers of BCCI did indeed launder billions of dollars for numerous unsavory characters (terrorist Abu Nidal, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, various Columbian drug lords) and ran the bank as a vast pyramid scheme, they come off in this book more sympathetically than Clifford, mainly because they seemed less interested in personal aggrandizement than professional success in a bank ostensibly owned and operated for the benefit of the Third World. Agha Hasan Abedi, the Pakistani founder of BCCI, used that image--and an ability to charm the likes of Clifford, Jimmy Carter and the royal families of Arabia--to get the bank on the world map; but Abedi’s ambition led him very quickly into dangerous and illegal deals. “A Full Service Bank” chronicles in detail the exposure of BCCI, primarily through a Customs Service sting operation and investigations prompted by an obsessed Senate investigator, and it’s a riveting, sometimes dramatic tale. Many BCCI bankers were arrested at the phony wedding of one of their better clients, a federal agent who had gone undercover to become a launderer of drug money for more than two years.